‘My performance had been humiliating, apparently, and downright unprofessional. But it wasn’t just this project. He was beginning to feel that I was out of sympathy with the whole basic philosophy that they’d been building up at Basingstoke. He had to tell me that he was beginning to wonder if my presence in the partnership was doing either of us any good. He suggested that I give this some thought over the next few days, while someone else got to work on Option Three.
‘The thing that really annoyed me, funnily enough, was that I’d got the idea for Option Four from that framed letter I’d bought at Kowalski’s shop in the Lane-the idea of a grid contained within an elaborate old frame. The idea had come all of a sudden in the middle of the night, and it had seemed so appropriate that I thought it just had to be right. When it fell so flat I felt, well, betrayed somehow.
‘I went back to my drawing board, and there were half a dozen telephone messages stuck all over it. One of them was to ring Judith Naismith, on a London number. I made the call, and immediately I heard her voice it was as if we’d left university only the day before, with only the faintest mid-Atlantic trace to mark the years between. She said she’d been glad to get my fax, but had been in a rush to get herself organized for a conference she was going to in Paris. She had a short stop-over in London, and she’d love to see me if I could spare any time that day.
‘Judith was the great unscaled peak among the women undergraduates in our group. All the lads had tried to seduce Judith at one time or another, and none had succeeded. Even Charlie, whose powers of persuasion had cut a swathe from the women’s college to the language school and through the nurses’ home, had been very subdued in his account of his final great attempt on the north face of Judith Naismith. She was a beautiful enigma, and her reappearance suddenly made up for the disaster of the morning’s meeting.
‘We met for lunch. She looked absolutely stunning, just as I remembered her.’
Although Kathy was absorbed in the story, Brock gave a little cough of impatience. Bob Jones mollified him by offering another whisky, and then continued.
‘We fairly quickly exhausted reminiscences and news of mutual friends and what we’d done since leaving university. I could see she was a bit edgy, and I asked if she was short of time. She said yes, really she couldn’t stay too long, but she’d wanted to find out about the letter I’d faxed her. I explained I’d picked it up by accident in a second-hand bookshop. I kind of rambled on a bit about the anniversary of my divorce, and she stopped me dead and said she’d like to visit the shop, and where was it? Suddenly I had the feeling that all the time she’d been much more interested in the letter than in seeing me again. I asked her what was interesting about it, and for a moment I could see her debating what to tell me, then she shrugged and started to explain.
‘“Mohr” means “Moor” in English, as in Moorish-the Arabs, you know? And apparently it was Karl Marx’s nickname. His family teased him that with his thick beard and swarthy complexion he was like a Moor.
‘His closest friend was Friedrich Engels-“Fred”. In April 1867 Marx went to Germany to deliver the manuscript of the first volume of Das Kapital to his publisher, Otto Karl Meissner, in Hamburg. He went on to Hanover before returning home to London in May. Gumpert was the name of Engels’ doctor in Manchester, and Mrs Burns was his mistress.
‘I think I made some stupid joke about it being a pity the letter was written by someone so unfashionable, and that I might have been lucky and found a letter from someone important, like Elvis. But all the time I was thinking about that blue plaque on the wall outside Kowalski’s shop, saying Karl Marx used to live there.
‘I asked if she thought there could be more. She seemed really puzzled about that. Apparently all of the correspondence between Marx and Engels was supposed to have been collected together when they both died. She said that it was now held in Amsterdam, in the International Institute of Social History. It had been published in nine volumes, and Judith said she was going to check the volume for 1867 and see how this letter fitted in. She was puzzled as to how it had come to be separated from the rest.
‘Then she asked me again where I’d found it. I kind of fooled around, and said that the price of that information might be high, considering how I’d always felt about her. You know, that sort of stuff. She humoured me, for about three seconds. So I paid the bill and we got a cab.
‘You should have seen her face when we got to Kowalski’s shop and I pointed out the plaque. There was the difference of dates, of course-Marx lived there in 1850, not 1867, but all the same, she was stunned. She said that coincidences like that just don’t happen. We walked into the shop half expecting to see the ghost of Marx himself standing behind the counter, waiting for us.
‘At first we got our wires crossed with Mr Kowalski. We assumed that the letter must have come from the shop itself, found in the attic or something, and he didn’t understand what we were going on about. Eventually he explained that he had bought it not so very long ago. The lady who had sold it to him had also given him a box of books, but no other letters that he could recall.
“What kind of books?” Judith demanded. “Old books, on history, or socialism perhaps?” He scratched his head and said no, he didn’t think so. He thought they were children’s books. He didn’t know where they would be now.
‘We spent a fruitless hour searching the shelves, Judith starting in Politics and History, and me in Children. Finally we spoke again to Kowalski, asking for the name of the person who’d sold him the letter. He was reluctant to give it to us, saying that the woman was elderly and might not want to be bothered. Was the document valuable, then? he wanted to know, sounding rather worried. He’d probably recognized the signs of an over-anxious buyer and thought there might be some money in this. He said he would speak to the seller himself, and see whether she had anything else that might be of interest to us. He took my business card and agreed to call me if anything turned up.
‘But it was Mrs Winterbottom herself who phoned me a couple of days after Judith had gone on to Paris. She didn’t seem to know what I wanted to talk to her about, so I explained that my friend was a historian, and she was interested in the letter I had bought from Mr Kowalski because it related to the period she was studying. Did Mrs Winterbottom have any other documents from that period? She wasn’t sure, but said she’d have a look. Apparently there were lots of old papers and things her mother had left, but whether they’d been thrown out by this time, she didn’t know. I told her that my friend would be back in London again in a couple of weeks, and asked if I could phone her nearer the time to arrange a meeting, and she gave me her address and phone number.
‘By the time Judith returned from Paris, Herbert and I had agreed to part company. The Lowell Partnership moved to much larger and more prestigious premises in Docklands, establishing a joint project office with a firm of New York architects for the Jerusalem Lane project, which they were now calling “Citicenter One”, would you believe. I took over the lease of this place, and set up on my own as Concept Design, with just one job, a loft conversion in a friend’s house in Maida Vale.